The Balladists

And white owl's feather.'

They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with the Queen of Faëry, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of The Wee Wee Man; while from The Elfin Knight we learn that woman's wit as well as woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing —

'A knight stands on yon high, high hill,
Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!
He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill,
The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'

and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark without a seam.'

It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediæval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland, research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,

'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'

was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht,

And they waded through red bluid to the knee;
For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth
Rins through the springs o' that countrie.'

The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.'

'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said;
"A goodlie gift you would give me;
I neither dought to buy or sell
At fair or tryst where I may be;
I dought neither speak to prince or peer
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."'

But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.

Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads – between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve:

'Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little abune her knee;
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little abune her bree;
And she 's awa' to Carterhaugh
As fast as she could gae.'

There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to fairyland:

'There cam' a wind out o' the north,
A sharp wind and a snell;
A deep sleep cam' over me
And from my horse I fell';

as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's love:

'Aboot the dead hour o' the night
She heard the bridles ring;
And Janet was as glad o' that
As any earthly thing.

And first gaed by the black, black steed,
And then gaed by the brown,
But fast she gripped the milk-white steed
And pu'ed the rider down';

and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form, she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in vassalage.

Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in Hiawatha. The baffled magician or witch – often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales – alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of The Twa Magicians, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.

But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess, tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the spell. Kempion is a type of a class of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings' sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and märchen; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous creature; and at the third kiss she turns into

'The loveliest ladye e'er could be.'

The rescuer asks —

'O, was it wehrwolf in the wood,
Or was it mermaid in the sea?
Or was it man, or vile womán,
My ain true love, that misshapéd thee?'

Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved weird. In King Henrie, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest, when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and

'A grisly ghost
Stands stamping on the floor.'

The manners of this Poltergeist are in keeping with her rough entrance on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the Marriage of Sir Gawain and other legends of the same type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded for having given the lady her will:

'When day was come and night was gane
And the sun shone through the ha',
The fairest ladye that e'er was seen
Lay between him and the wa'.'

In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They are apt to prove to be of the race of the succubi, from whom a kiss means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, The Lord Nann, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. Alison Gross is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other sex. Thus The Demon Lover is a tale known in several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr. Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:

'He turned him right and round about,
And the tear blindit his e'e;
"I would never have trodden on Irish ground
If it hadna been for thee."'

They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a drearier voyage than that of True Thomas – to a Hades of ice and isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:

'"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said,
"So dreary wi' frost and snow?"